Last week our Year 3 & 5 students completed NAPLAN. Over two weeks students completed four tests; Writing, Reading, Conventions of Language and Numeracy. The Writing test required students to write a narrative using a prompt titled The Key. Conventions of Language covers spelling and grammar. Our students managed extremely well with the online testing platform, and I am pleased to say we had no technical issues what so ever. Thankfully we had very few absent students which made ‘catch up’ testing much smoother than previous years. Now we just wait for the results which are scheduled to arrive in July.
Brightpath was the focus for our Pupil Free Day on Monday. Brightpath is a research-based writing assessment and improvement tool that uses typical classroom writing tasks to help teachers develop assessment skills, differentiate learning and identify teaching points based on how they have assessed their students’ writing samples. Since Monday teachers R-6 have been busy working with students to collect narrative and in some cases recount writing samples so we can begin using the Brightpath assessment platform. Visiting classrooms this week I saw students using visual prompts and text to support their writing. In week 1 of next term teachers will work with the Brightpath facilitator to moderate the writing samples and plan next steps in learning.
The Governing Council Annual General Meeting was held on Tuesday 14th March. At the meeting a number of reports were presented including the school’s annual report. This report will be made available on the school website early next term. Our Governing Council membership this year has not changed too much. We farewell Shari Davidson who has retired and thank her for many years of service, and particularly for her role as Governing Council secretary. Our Governing Council members for 2023 are Daniel Killey – Chairperson, Leon Pendergast –Treasurer, Kylie Farey, Adam Forbes, Kate Thorn, Kate Gabel, Carly Clarke, Rob Blythman and Alina Gransbury.
Harmony Week was celebrated at Angaston Primary School last week with students spending time in class learning about diversity, inclusion, respect etc for the many different cultures that call Australia home. We had food from around the world to taste each lunch time including pretzels, croissants, rice and damper. We finished the week with a sausage sizzle at lunch time. Students enjoyed a picnic style lunch with their buddy classes, and dressed in orange/traditional dress connected to their own cultural background. We had a wonderful display of paper hands surrounding a world map. Students decorated the hands with symbols, colours etc connected to their family backgrounds and we are more diverse then we initially thought. Thank you to the many students who made a gold coin donation. We raised $316.15 for Save the Children.
A big thank you to Nat for organising our Harmony Week activities, and to Claire and Mrs Hueppauff for cooking the BBQ on Friday.
Our whole School Assembly in week 7 was hosted by Room 7/Burne, Room 1/Irwin Hearnden and Room 2/Tempest Hearnden. We were treated to a wonderful maths/art display from the year 3/4 class showing us their optical illusions as well as time lapse videos of how they completed the drawing. A very clever connection between maths and art. The JP classes treated us to a video demonstrating all the learning that has taken place so far this term in their classrooms as well as a very catchy song about Being Kind. It was a very entertaining assembly. Thank you.
Congratulations to the following students who received an Encouragement Award for all their hard work in relation to our school motto of Be Safe, Be Kind, Work Hard at the week 7 & 9 assembly:
| Hugh Wheeler | Chase Pedder | May Kearon | Charlie Kirtlan | Holly Trappman |
| Archie Donohue | Savannah Hueppauff | Bella Rudiger | Amelia Farey | Charlotte Brumfield |
| Samia Strugnell | Ruby Hughes | Oliver Giles | Ivy Merkel | Fin Webster-Payne |
| Saxon Taborek | Olive Chaplin | Olivia Irvine | Ginevra Slujagic | Sienna Anthony |
| Hudson Moore | Seb Meyer | Hazel Graetz | Lachlan Pendergast | Hannah Fleet |
| Xavier Tempest | Celeste Deakin | Sophie Schiller | Jeremy Dowsett Moore | Zoe McGrath |
| Mirella Mason | Ethan Barnett | Miley Fridd | Tyson Mulholland-Gill | Arlo Logan |
| Edith Dayman-Hall | Jessica Bartsch | Toby Foreshaw | Thomas Gadsby | Ben Kraft |
| Marcella Zanker | Dillon Lade | Charlie Schiller | | |
Amelai Zanker Louis Manuel Archie Clarke Josie O'Shea
“If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.”
Roald Dahl
Have a lovely Easter weekend, and enjoy the extra time off.
Regards
Lynda
